In 2010, we created packaged apps to fill a missing link between extensions and hosted apps. They look the same as a hosted app to the user, but under the covers, they are more like traditional extensions. Over time, we realized that a clearer separation between the Chrome browser and apps was necessary, both for security reasons and to conform to user expectations. We launched the next generation of Chrome Apps, a new version of packaged apps, last year to address those issues, and today we're announcing the deprecation of legacy packaged apps.

Starting today, no new legacy packaged apps can be published in the Chrome Web Store. In December, all existing legacy packaged app listings will be removed from the Chrome Web Store’s search and browse functions. Existing legacy packaged apps can be updated until Chrome stops loading them in June of 2015. Nothing will change for hosted apps or new packaged apps.

Updated 04/09/2015: The legacy packaged app deprecation schedule has been revised. In August, all existing legacy packaged app listings will be removed from the Chrome Web Store’s search and browse functions. Existing legacy packaged apps can be updated until Chrome stops loading them in February of 2016.

Developers are strongly encouraged to migrate their legacy packaged apps to either Chrome Apps or extensions. To get started, check out our migration tutorial, and contact us on the chromium-apps forum or our G+ page with any questions.

Updated 03/22/2016: The legacy packaged app deprecation schedule has been revised. Existing legacy packaged app listings will be removed from the Chrome Web Store's search and browse functions in late 2016. Chrome will stop loading these apps soon thereafter.

Posted by Amanda Bishop, Product Manager

[Cross-posted from the Google Developers Blog]

Last summer, we launched Chromecast, a small, affordable device that lets you cast online video, music and anything from the web to your TV. Today at Google I/O, we announced Android TV, the newest form factor to the Android platform, and a way to extend the reach of Google Cast to more devices, like televisions, set-top boxes and consoles.

Check out Coming to a Screen Near You for some details on everything we’re doing to make your TV the place to be.

For developers though--sorry, you don’t get to unwind in front of the TV. We need you to get to work and help us create the best possible TV experience, with all of the new features announced at I/O today.

Get started with Android TV
In addition to Google Cast apps that send content to the TV, you can now build immersive native apps and console-style games on Android TV devices. These native apps work with TV remotes and gamepads, even if you don’t have your phone handy. The Android L Developer Preview SDK includes the new Leanback support library that allows you to design smoother, simpler, living room apps.

And this is just the beginning. In the fall, new APIs will allow you to cast directly to these apps, so users can control the app with the phone, the remote, or even their Android Wear watch. You’ll also start seeing Android TV set-top boxes, consoles and televisions from Sony, TP Vision, Sharp, Asus, Razer and more.

Help more users find your Google Cast app
We want to help users more easily find your content, so we’ve improved the Google Cast SDK developer console to let you upload your app icon, app name, and app category for Android, iOS and Chrome. These changes will help your app get discovered on chromecast.com/apps and on Google Play.

Additional capabilities have also been added to the Google Cast SDK. These include: Media Player Library enhancements, bringing easier integration with MPEG-DASH Smooth Streaming, and HLS. We’ve also added WebAudio & WebGL support, made the Cast Companion Library available, and added enhanced Closed Caption support. And coming soon, we will add support for queuing and ID delegation.

Ready to get started? Visit developer.android.com/tv and developers.google.com/cast for the SDKs, style guides, tutorials, sample code, and the API references. You can also request an ADT-1 devkit to bootstrap your Android TV development.

By Dave Burke and Majd Bakar, Engineering Directors and TV Junkies

The web is a rich computing platform with unparalleled reach. In recent years, mobile devices have brought the web to billions of new users and introduced many new device capabilities, screen sizes, input methods, and more. To help developers navigate this brave new world, we built Web Fundamentals, a curated source for modern best practices. Today, we’re making it even easier to build multi-device experiences with the Beta release of the Web Starter Kit.
Web Fundamentals' guidelines are intended to be fundamental to the platform: useful no matter which framework you choose or which browser your users run. We have articles about responsive layouts, forms, touch, media, performance, device capabilities, and setting up a development workflow. Articles cover both coding and design. For example, the article on layout design patterns explains both the usability tradeoffs between different layout options and how to implement them. The performance section complements PageSpeed Insights, an auditing tool that encourages instant (<1 second) mobile web sites.

Designed to help you apply Web Fundamentals' best practices in new projects, Web Starter Kit is a lightweight boilerplate with templates and tooling. Web Starter Kit gives you responsive layout, a visual style guide, and optional workflow features like performance optimization so you can keep your pages lean and fast.


Both Web Fundamentals and the Web Starter Kit are actively developed and curated by a team of developers from Google and several open-source contributors. Our source code is available on GitHub, and we welcome contributions and feedback. Looking ahead, we’ll be adding new content and working with the web development community to refine our advice. Please file an issue or submit a pull request to help us capture web development best practices.

We look forward to a more modern, multi-device web!

Posted by Paul Kinlan, Developer Advocate and Web Fundamentalist

Extensions are a great way to enhance the browsing experience. However, some extensions ask for broad permissions that allow access to sensitive data such as browser cookies or history. Last year, we introduced the Chrome Apps & Extensions Developer Tool, which provides an improved developer experience for debugging apps and extensions. The newest version of the tool, available today, lets power users audit any app or extension and get visibility into the precise actions that it's performing.

Once you’ve installed the Chrome Apps & Extensions Developer Tool, it will start locally auditing your extensions and apps as you use them. For each app or extension, you can see historical activity over the past few days as well as real-time activity by clicking the “Behavior” link. The tool highlights activities that involve your information, such as reading website cookies or modifying web sites, in a privacy section. You can also search for URLs to see if an extension has modified any matching pages. If you’re debugging an app or extension, you can use the “Realtime” tab to watch the stream of API calls as an extension or app runs. This can help you track down glitches or identify unnecessary API calls.

Whether you’re a Chrome power user or a developer testing an extension, the Chrome Apps & Extensions Developer Tool can give you the information you need to understand how apps and extensions affect your browsing.

Posted by Adrienne Porter Felt, Software Engineer and Extension Tinkerer

Today we’re announcing the addition of 64-bit support to Chrome, with two brand new 64-bit Dev and Canary channels for Windows 7 and 8 users, giving a faster and more secure browsing experience. To try it out, download the 64-bit installer from our Canary or Dev download pages. The new version replaces the existing version while preserving all your settings and bookmarks, so there’s no need to uninstall a current installation of Chrome.

The majority of our users on Windows 7 or higher now have systems capable of running 64-bit applications, and this version of Chrome can take full advantage of these newer capabilities. This includes several improvements that align perfectly with Chrome’s core principles of speed, security and stability:

• Speed: 64-bit allows us to take advantage of the latest processor and compiler optimizations, a more modern instruction set, and a calling convention that allows more function parameters to be passed quickly by registers. As a result, speed is improved, especially in graphics and multimedia content, where we see an average 25% improvement in performance.

• Security: With Chrome able to take advantage of the latest OS features such as High Entropy ASLR on Windows 8, security is improved on 64-bit platforms as well. Those extra bits also help us better defend against exploitation techniques such as JIT spraying, and improve the effectiveness of our existing security defense features like heap partitioning.

• Stability: Finally, we’ve observed a marked increase in stability for 64-bit Chrome over 32-bit Chrome. In particular, crash rates for the the renderer process (i.e. web content process) are almost half that of 32-bit Chrome.

We encourage all our users, especially developers, to give the new 64-bit Chrome a spin, and we’re looking forward to hearing your feedback so we can make 64-bit Chrome work great and bring its benefits to our Beta and Stable channel users.

Posted by Will Harris, Software Engineer and Stretcher of Pointers